Leo McKinstry skriver i The Express at der bliver en dyr regning at betale for at have støttet Hamas

This populist anti-Israeli posturing is dangerous. It shows not the slightest grasp of the reality of Islamist aggression in the Middle East and the depth of the challenge that Israel faces.

In practice denouncing the Jewish state means siding with the malevolent, murderous forces of jihadism, a stance that not only represents a complete inversion of morality but a ­suicidal disdain for the interests of western civilisation.

It’s “worse than al-Qaeda,” Brett McGurk, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for Iraq and Iran, told lawmakers last month. It “is no longer simply a terrorist organization. It is now a full-blown army seeking to establish a self-governing state through the Tigris and Euphrates valley in what is now Syria and Iraq.”

Some accounts say it’s no longer seeking to do this — but has already done it.

In the Syrian town of Raqqah, called the Islamic State’s capital, the movement governs with an austere, barbaric but orderly hand. According to this telling New York Times piece, for which a reporter spent six days interviewing residents, crime is rare, traffic cops keep the streets moving and tax collectors are organized. Those accused of theft have also lost hands. It’s a glimpse of what may be coming to the rest of the captured territory, a nation-sized swath of terrain spilling across borders.

But it’s not just the land itself. It’s what the land holds that suggests the true extent of the Islamic State’s power. It “now controls a volume of resources and territory unmatched in the history of extremist organizations,” wrote defense expert Janine Davidson of the Council of Foreign Relations. She added: “Should [the Islamic State] continue this pattern of consolidation and expansion, this terrorist ‘army’ will eventually be able to exert a destabilizing influence far beyond the immediate area.”

I wonder if any readers have an answer to this question: Has anybody, throughout this whole conflict around Gaza, heard any reporter inside Gaza, at any time, preface or conclude their remarks with ‘reporting from Gaza, under Hamas government reporting restrictions’? I don’t watch television news all the time and so may have missed it, but I don’t think I have heard this said even once.

Which is strange. When reporting from a dictatorship like Gaza it used to be the norm that reporters would preface or conclude any report with some variant of this formula. Doing so was a neat way to send the warning to viewers that you were reporting from a place where the authorities were censoring what you could say.

Before the 2003 war in Iraq, for instance, reporters broadcasting for television or radio from inside Iraq nearly always made reference to the fact that they were reporting under restrictions imposed on them by Saddam Hussein’s government. This often meant a Hussein goon was standing nearby checking that nothing untoward was said.

In many ways, CCTV coverage of the conflict without the networks’ editorial picture selection and emotional but information-lacking voice-overs would probably do a better job at informing the public.

Yes, we would still see the destruction caused by Israeli shelling but the CCTV cameras would also catch Hamas terrorists firing from civilian areas, show how the IDF is dropping leaflets warning civilians ahead of bombings and broadcast how civilians are used as human shields — all important elements of this war usually missing from the coverage.

On Tuesday, Italian journalist Gabriele Barbati sent out the following tweet: “Out of #Gaza far from #Hamas retaliation: misfired rocket killed children yday in Shati. Witness: militants rushed and cleared debris.”

Despite the fact that Hamas rockets have a high rate of misfiring and civilians are often caught in the middle of intense urban warfare, every Palestinian civilian casualty is automatically assumed to have been caused by Israel. And so when a strike killed several children in Shati refugee camp, the media rushed to blame Israel even though the IDF said it did not target this site.

Israel’s investigation concluded that a Palestinian rocket fell short, and instead of killing their intended civilian targets in Israel, killed the Palestinian civilians.

Mr. Barbati’s reporting not only supports Israel’s version of the events, it raises a far greater question. Are foreign journalists working under the constant threat from Hamas and thus “self-censoring” themselves? Is this why we don’t see coverage of Hamas terrorists firing rockets from civilian areas, the use of human shields and other war crimes?

Palestinian journalist Radjaa Abou Dagga, for example, wrote an article for French newspaper Libération, published July 23, detailing how Hamas intimidated him, forcing him to leave Gaza, and how Hamas terrorists use a section of Shifa hospital, just a few meters from the emergency room, as their offices, confirm the earlier Washington Post story.

The next day, Mr. Dagga asked Libération to remove his article from their website, apparently out of fear for his family still in Gaza. Other Western journalists have been caught removing Hamas-critical tweets without explanation while others have been prevented by Hamas from leaving Gaza.

Finally, Dr. Françoise Hampton, University of Essex (UK) wrote about the concept of “military necessity.”

Military necessity is a legal concept used in international humanitarian law (IHL) as part of the legal justification for attacks on legitimate military targets that may have adverse, even terrible, consequences for civilians and civilian objects. It means that military forces in planning military actions are permitted to take into account the practical requirements of a military situation at any given moment and the imperatives of winning.

What constitutes a military objective will change during the course of a conflict. As some military objectives are destroyed, the enemy will use other installations for the same purpose, thereby making them military objectives and their attack justifiable under military necessity. There is a similarly variable effect on the determination of proportionality. The greater the military advantage anticipated, the larger the amount of collateral damage - often civilian casualties - which will be “justified” or “necessary.“

Civilian casualties are much to be mourned, but what becomes clear – absent the propaganda element or a shaky notion of sportsmanship – is that Israel has the right and indeed the obligation to defend its people, has the right to “win” the war of self-defense that it is fighting, and has taken account of the requirements of international law regarding “proportionality” and “military necessity.” This, coupled with the willingness of Israel to accept the Egyptian-sponsored ceasefire, acceptance of a UN-sponsored humanitarian truce, and the continued provision of food, medicine, and electricity to the residents of Gaza, should help erase the “buts” of fair-minded people.

Are the “overwhelming majority” of the dead really civilians? It would seem so. We see a great deal of grotesque and heart-rending footage of dead and bleeding women and children but never so much as a glimpse of killed or wounded fighters. Nor do reporters question or comment on the complete absence of Gazan military casualties, an extraordinary phenomenon unique to this conflict. The reality of course is that Hamas make great efforts to segregate their military casualties to preserve the fiction that Israel is killing civilians only. There are also increasing indications that Hamas, through direct force or threat, are preventing journalists from filming their fighters, whether dead or alive.

We will not get to the truth until the battle is over. But we know now that Hamas have ordered their people to report all deaths as innocent civilians. We know too that Hamas has a track record of lying about casualties. After Operation Cast Lead, the 2008-09 fighting in Gaza, the IDF estimated that of 1,166 Palestinian deaths, 709 were fighters. Hamas – backed by several NGOs – claimed that only 49 of its fighters had been killed, the rest were innocent civilians. Much later they were forced to admit that the IDF had been right all along and between 600 and 700 of the casualties had in fact been fighters. But the short-memoried media are incapable of factoring this in before broadcasting their ill-founded and inflammatory assertions.

Analysis of casualty details released by Qatar-based Al Jazeera indicate that so far in the conflict most of those killed in Gaza have been young men of fighting age, not women, children or old people. According to one analyst, despite comprising around 50% of the population, the proportion of women among the dead is 21%.

Preliminary analysis by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center in Israel suggests that 71, or 46.7%, of the first 152 Palestinians killed were fighters and 81, or 53.3%, non-involved civilians.

None of this analysis is definitive. But it does cast doubt upon the accusations of indiscriminate attack against the population by the IDF and upon the UN estimates – widely trumpeted as fact by the media and the not-exactly unbiased United Nations – that between 70 and 80% of Palestinian casualties have been civilians.

Nevertheless, many innocent civilians have tragically been killed. How has this happened, given the IDF’s measures aimed at minimizing such deaths?

IDF commanders say they never intentionally fire at targets where uninvolved civilians are present, a policy that goes much further than the Geneva Conventions demand. This policy has been confirmed to me by foot soldiers on the ground and F16 pilots carrying out strikes into Gaza.

Og Kemp konkluderer omvendt om Hamas

This sickening exploitation of their own people’s suffering, and media’s complicity in it, is nowhere more cynically demonstrated than in the operating theaters of the Gaza Strip. Without the slightest regard for life-saving hygiene, or for the care, privacy or dignity of the wounded, Palestinian officials enthusiastically hustle camera crews in to the emergency room as desperate surgeons battle for a bleeding and broken child’s life.

Hamas, the terrorist group controlling Gaza, endeavors to turn Israel’s military superiority to its own advantage by portraying the Israeli response to intense rocket and mortar fire as disproportionate and indiscriminate. In doing so, it hopes to turn public opinion against the Jewish state, as well as bolster its own standing at the expense of the Fatah-led Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank.

Fatality figures provided by Hamas and other groups should be viewed with suspicion. Not only do Israeli figures cast doubt on claims that the vast majority of fatalities are non-combatants, but a careful review of Palestinian sources also raises doubts.

Analyses of the casualties listed in the daily reports published by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, a Gaza-based organization operating under Hamas rule, indicate that young males ages 17 to 30 make up a large portion of the fatalities, and a particularly noticeable spike occurs between males ages 21 to 27, a pattern consistent with the age distribution typically found among combatants and military conscripts. Palestinian sources attempt to conceal this discrepancy with their public message by labeling most of these young men as civilians. Only a minority is identified as members of armed groups. As a result, the PCHR calculates civilian fatalities at 82% as of July 26. PCHR provides the most detailed casualty reports of the various Palestinian agencies from Gaza that provide figures to the media and to international organizations like the UN. Its figures closely match those of the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry and other groups.

The green arrow marks the school gates. On the ground are the two targets of the strike. One has a beard and holds his index finger up in the Wahabbist symbol of there being one God for whom this chunkster will kill and die. The Man in Black with the latex gloves is supposed to be some kind of paramedic, but he’s just an actor, as you’ll see. Note the scaffolding marked by the red arrow.

Now, suddenly the two men who were targeted on the street are on the school grounds!

They’ve also changed places. The Wahabbist was on the other wounded man’s right side; now he’s on his left. And the man in the red shirt, lying behind both wounded men? The last time we saw him, he was in the street.

He’s unhurt. Like almost everybody else, he’s pretending. At some point a little girl appears. Don’t worry; she’s not injured.

The Man in Black roars for help, and Red Shirt is still proned out, but the brown-shirted man who was lying next to him is now gone. Here’s another photo of the little girl.

Though we’re told she’s dead, her mouth is now open, and Brown Shirt has definitely dematerialized. Like my ghost cat. A man wearing a baseball cap stoops to help the little girl.

He picks her up. But wait! Brown shirt is back! I’ve marked him with a green arrow.

He’s sitting up, next to his hale and hearty friend Red Shirt.

The man who picked up the little girl is getting ready to take her to the ambulance.

Behind him, Brown Shirt has gotten to his knees. He’s going to be fine. The Wahabbist on the right is now pointing to where he thinks he’s headed. A graybeard in a purple shirt helpfully screams like a maniac. Behind him to the right, a bored girls stands with her arms folded.

The man who picked up the “wounded” little girl now sprints through the gates, carrying her to safety.

Hold on: It’s a completely different man. Did he steal the little girl from the other guy? Or did this man take her because he’s younger and fitter, so he can run faster? Yes, that’s what happened. His plan is to just keep on running. Forever.

A video has emerged of an imam in Chicago preaching that Muslims should wage war against Israel and that paradise awaits those who die in jihad. The website of his mosque says it has hundreds of members and a full-time Islamic school for children.

The sermons by Imam Mohamed Elimam of the Islamic Center of Chicago, also known as the At-Takaful Islamic Society, took place between July 18 and 25. A documentary on the Society’s website identifies it as the alternative name for the Islamic Center of Chicago and shows children learning at its school.

The organization is listed as a church and is not required to file IRS forms. Its 2012 990 Form lists its revenue for that year as $856,732.

“Anyone killed or martyred is to be called a civilian from Gaza or Palestine, before we talk about his status in jihad or his military rank. Don’t forget to always add ‘innocent civilian’ or ‘innocent citizen’ in your description of those killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza.

“Begin [your reports of] news of resistance actions with the phrase ‘In response to the cruel Israeli attack,’ and conclude with the phrase ‘This many people have been martyred since Israel launched its aggression against Gaza.’ Be sure to always perpetuate the principle of ‘the role of the occupation is attack, and we in Palestine are fulfilling [the role of] the reaction.’

“Beware of spreading rumors from Israeli spokesmen, particularly those that harm the home front. Be wary regarding accepting the occupation’s version [of events]. You must always cast doubts on this [version], disprove it, and treat it as false.

“Avoid publishing pictures of rockets fired into Israel from [Gaza] city centers. This [would] provide a pretext for attacking residential areas in the Gaza Strip. Do not publish or share photos or video clips showing rocket launching sites or the movement of resistance [forces] in Gaza.

“To the administrators of news pages on Facebook: Do not publish close-ups of masked men with heavy weapons, so that your page will not be shut down [by Facebook] on the claim that you are inciting violence. In your coverage, be sure that you say: ‘The locally manufactured shells fired by the resistance are a natural response to the Israeli occupation that deliberately fires rockets against civilians in the West Bank and Gaza’…”

Over the past week or so, the BBC has put considerable effort into amplifying and promoting Hamas’ main pre-condition for a ceasefire: the removal of border restrictions imposed by Egypt and Israel in response to terrorism against their citizens carried out by terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip. Documentation of some of those BBC efforts can be seen here, here, here and here.

In the past few days, however, we have seen a shift in the BBC’s approach to the topic. No longer content with ‘merely’ providing context-free advertisement for the demands of a proscribed terror organisation, the BBC has now adopted that organisation’s terminology, ditching its former use of the phrase “economic blockade” for the inaccurate and partial term “siege”.

Here is a screenshot from the July 28th edition of BBC Two’s flagship news and current affairs programme ‘Newsnight’.

One presumes that the BBC is familiar with the Oxford English Dictionary. Here is its definition of a siege:

“A military operation in which enemy forces surround a town or building, cutting off essential supplies, with the aim of compelling those inside to surrender.”

A besieging army does not ensure and facilitate the provision of humanitarian aid including food and medical supplies to those it surrounds. It does not supply them with 50% of their electricity supply, with oil and diesel or with cooking gas. It does not help them export their produce and give their farmers agricultural training. It does not evacuate their sick and treat them – sometimes at its own expense – in its own hospitals.

Israel of course does all of the above – and more – and critically, Israel’s aim is not to compel “those inside to surrender”, but to prevent in as far as is possible the flow of weapons and dual-use goods which can be used to manufacture weapons into the Gaza Strip because for fourteen years its own civilians have been under attack by terrorist organisations located there.

As many as 25 percent of Hamas rocket attacks against Israel in the current Israel-Hamas war don’t make it out of Gaza and strike civilians inside the coastal enclave, Algemeiner Editor Dovid Efune asserted in an interview on Real News TV on Friday.

Asked about an explosion at a UN school on Thursday, which killed at least 15, according to Gazan reports, Efune pointed to the IDF’s claim that the source of the munition may have been Hamas.

Italian journalist Gabriele Barbati said he was able to speak freely about witnessing a Hamas misfire that killed nine children at the Shati camp, confirming the Israel Defense Forces version of events, but only after leaving Gaza, “far from Hamas retaliation.”

On Twitter, Barbati, Jerusalem Correspondent for Radio Popolare Milano, and a former reporter for Sky Italia, in Beijing, said, “Out of #Gaza far from #Hamas retaliation: misfired rocket killed children yday [yesterday] in Shati. Witness: militants rushed and cleared debris.”

He said, “@IDFSpokesperson said truth in communique released yesterday about Shati camp massacre. It was not #Israel behind it.”

On Tuesday, the IDF released aerial photos showing how a rocket from Gaza targeting Israel hit the Shati camp, run by the UNRWA, and Al Shifa Hospital, which has become a de-facto Hamas headquarters, against international rules of war.

Barbati said he was unable to speak about the Al Shifa hit, but he was certain that it was a Hamas rocket that hit the Shati camp, and a witness saw militants rushing to clean the debris.

That burning warehouse was full of Hamas rockets. The series of concussions you hear are secondary explosions, not the primary explosions of aerial munitions. When you bomb a warehouse full of fueled rockets, each rocket will explode separately. What happened was the empty marketplace next to the burning warehouse became the set for a Pallywood production, but then the rockets started exploding, killing and maiming the people who tried to exploit this situation.

I know they’re secondary explosions because they’re causing no destruction. No fountains of earth or clouds of dust appear with each loud BOOM! And the Palestinians also sent out a photo of what they called an “unexploded Israeli missile” from this incident.

It’s not. The size would mean that it was an MK-84 2000-lb. general-purpose bomb, but those have casings that are cast in one piece. This “munition” has a welded-on nose cone. You can clearly see the the weld line, part of it in white. Therefore it’s not Israeli. It’s a prop for sympathetic or coerced photographers.

UPDATE

A reader tipped me off that a nearly identical photo was published on July 14, 2014.

That means this object has nothing whatsoever to do with the events of July 30, 2014. Note the spurious caption. Great work, Getty Images!

This next bit of video is very gruesome, but it shows that I’m right. You don’t have to watch it because I’ve isolated the relevant evidence that this damage was caused by Hamas rockets exploding. Read the description below the video first.

It contains footage of a man whose face, arms, torso, and legs are burned black. If you click the image, it’s pixelated so that you can’t see the terrible details.

His legs are also broken. The only thing that could’ve done all that was an exploding rocket that smashed into him and doused him in burning fuel.

WARNING! WARNING! CONJECTURE AHEAD!

He has rolled trouser legs, indicating that he’s a Salafist Wahabbist. He may be a Hamas operative who was blown out of the warehouse and across the street.

Here’s more evidence that part of a burning rocket shooting along the wall wreaked all that havoc. First, we see the body of Rani Rayan, marked with the green arrow.

We’re told that he was killed by an aerial munition, but the paramedic sitting up next to him is alive. Also, look at all the shoes lying around, and remember that most people were injured in the feet, ankles, shins, and lower body.

Next, the fronts of the two ambulances.

Why would the fronts be shattered if the air strike happened behind the ambulances, as the videos show? Here’s the answer, which also explains why the bystanders turned on the water. Look at the smoke stain and holes in the wall, marked with a green arrow.

They’re from a Hamas rocket fuel tank. Because it was a tank, it contained no shrapnel. The fuel ignited in the warehouse, causing the tank to shoot like a torpedo across the street. It struck and killed Rani Rayan, breaking his legs. Please forgive the awful image, but it proves that I’m right. He has no shrapnel injuries, only badly broken legs.

The fuel tank then exploded on the ground in the corner of the courtyard, blowing off everybody’s shoes and injuring them in the lower extremities. It turned each stone and piece of trash into a low-flying projectile.

All the videos to which I’ve linked are heavily edited to persuade viewers that this was an air strike on ambulances, but when the people trying to deceive you don’t know about military or technical matters, they make mistakes.

One of the secondary explosions was caught on film, at 2:03. You can hear the explosion and see the puff of smoke from the rocket blowing up.

So: the open-air market was closed, not crowded or busy. Israel had declared a ceasefire that did not include Shijaiyah, because Hamas kept firing rockets from that neighborhood. The Israelis struck a warehouse, not the market. Their intelligence was good; the fourteen secondary explosions show that the warehouse was full of rockets. The Palestinians showed up to create propaganda. They brought ambulances and frantic paramedics, but their inhuman leaders hadn’t told them that the warehouse was a giant bomb waiting to go off.

The rockets exploded, Hamas got its faked atrocity video, and the stenographers of the western media dutifully wrote what they were told.

Does it matter to anybody that the whole thing is a lie from top to bottom?

Update

The Telegraph article has very high-quality video that allowed me to garner further proof that this was a self-inflicted massacre.

First, you can see Rani Rayan a second before his death. He’s marked with the green arrow.

The moment the explosion happens, every person nearby has his feet knocked out from under him.

All those men are airborne, their legs having been hit with and forced backward by a pressure wave only a few inches above the ground. The first explosion sounds like a pulse-jet engine: preh-keh-ka-boom. That’s the noise of a large, hard object clattering down the cinder-block wall.

It was an exploding Hamas rocket fuel tank that killed and injured these people. I have no doubt.

History on Israel Palestine Conflict - News Update-Israelis in the towns and villages that have been getting struck by hundreds of rockets fired from Palestinians in Gaza said Sunday they are wary of cease-fire talks if they don’t end the terror people have been living with for years.